It's new to me: Daikaijū Monogatari
Or, Super Shell Monsters Story. Either way, this role-playing game from Birthday and Hudson never made its way out of Japan, at least not officially.
This column is “It’s new to me,” in which I’ll play a game I’ve never played before — of which there are still many despite my habits — and then write up my thoughts on the title, hopefully while doing existing fans justice. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.
You need a certain level of patience to be happy with some of the elements of old-school role-playing games, and that’s fine. Games don’t need to be for everyone, and every game certainly doesn’t need to be for everyone: it’s perfectly acceptable to design something with only a specific subset of sickos in mind. Not everyone is going to enjoy Phantasy Star like I do, for instance, unless they’re playing the Sega Ages version that cuts down on encounter rate and boosts the experience and money you receive from winning random battles, in order to take out some of the repetitive, grindy nature of the game, and its constant interruptions. And not everyone is going to enjoy Phantasy Star even after playing it with those adjustments, either.
Phantasy Star was the example I used there, but it could have been any number of games instead. Phantasy Stars II or III, or Dragon Quest, or the original, more difficult Japanese version of Final Fantasy IV, or Dragon Slayer: The Legend of Heroes, and so on. These earlier entries in the genre, in part because storytelling hadn’t fully blossomed into what it would become in RPGs, in part because more battles allowed for a game’s length to be extended when up against storage and memory limitations, can be a little rougher even for those who find themselves to be fans of old-school RPGs. There’s always an older school, is the thing, so if you grew up in the later 16-bit era or the 32-bit one, the state of things on the 8-bit side or in early 16-bit efforts such as Final Fantasy IV or Phantasy Star II, in comparison to what later entries in those same series would look and feel like, can go a bit underappreciated or misunderstood.
This is a lengthy preamble, but stick with me. The point is to make sure that you know that it’s clear, extremely clear, that I am not one of those people who balks at these earlier RPGs. Sure, the grind of the era can be a little annoying, the constant encounters sometimes wear on you as you’re just trying to get from Point A to Point B, but in every case cited above, it’s worth it for what else is on offer in the game. Yes, even in Star III — despite its obvious faults, it’s a good game that just couldn’t quite keep up to its ambition or the quality of the rest of the series. These franchises might have improved as innovations and technology and tastes did, but there was still plenty here worth enjoying even before any of that happened.
It’s important that you know this about me, for maximum impact here: Daikaijū Monogatari’s encounter rate is too high. It’s too high! While playing, I struggled to think of any games with a more intrusive encounter rate — Daikaijū Monogatari’s actually impacts the playing of the rest of the game. Battles are fought so often, so regularly, that remembering what you were doing before you got stuck in three of them in a row within a few steps of each other is a normal occurrence. Then you end up going the wrong way, because you forget just where you’re headed to, and you fight a few battles before realizing, oh, wait, I should have been going in the other direction, and then you fight more battles to get back to where you were, and you hope that the annoyance from this happening keeps it from happening again as you try to recall what that NPC said earlier about… that thing you were… was it a person or a treasure? Ah, nuts.
It’s a real shame, as well, because Daikaijū Monogatari actually has some things going on for it. The problem is that just about everything it does well is countered, to at least some degree, by something else that detracts from the experience. An example: the sprites and art in battles are lovely. There’s a ton of detail on these huge enemy sprites, and their designs are pretty well differentiated to keep things feeling fresh. Your own characters, while their backs are turned to you, are distinct and easy to tell apart, which matters given how you can swap your party members in and out from a much larger group of individuals with their own strengths, weaknesses, and skills. Cities and towns can have some clear-cut differences, as well, that can make them, at the least, interesting to look at (though, occasionally, annoying to navigate depending on how and what kind of interesting we’re talking about).
And yet, the overworld of Shelldorado — get ready to hear that pun a billion times — is bland, it’s generic. The sprites on the map and in towns are all small, in the way Final Fantasy IV’s sprites were small when it was criticized for looking a bit like an NES game with a better color palette to pull from while on the map. The difference is that Final Fantasy IV released in 1991, before Square had figured out how to create larger, more detailed, more masterful sprite work on the SNES — a growth line that eventually led us to the absurdity [complimentary] of Bahamut Lagoon’s amazing sprites. Daikaijū Monogatari released in December of 1994, or, eight months after Final Fantasy VI had fully left behind the graphical inadequacies of its predecessors on the same hardware, by implementing sprites of the same size both in battle and on the map, while using more SNES-specific techniques and features for a far more detailed and lovely world map. Now, not everything released in 1994 had to look as good as Final Fantasy VI, sure, but it’s the kind of difference that sticks out in the wrong way, and compared unfavorably to the likes of Dragon Quest V, as well, despite it coming out over two years prior. With the use of hindsight, it’s also not even up to the usual standards of Hudson on the SNES and Super Famicom: Tengai Makyō Zero, released exactly a year later with Hudson once again publishing, is one of the most impressive RPGs on the system from a visual perspective.
Now, visuals and graphics aren’t everything. However, when other systems aren’t up to snuff or don’t work or are degrading the experience, it helps to have something else to be able to compliment. Birthday, the developer, got halfway there with the visuals. Battles look great when things are static, less so in motion. The overworld map looks behind the times, as do the sprites outside of battles — especially disappointing given that Daikaijū Monogatari features a wealth of distinct possible party members, and seeing higher-detail versions of their sprites would have been welcome.
Of course, the main issue with the map is that you don’t spend enough time on it. Instead, you’re taking a couple of steps and then triggering a random battle. And then you’re doing it again, and again, until you forget which way you were going, and have to fight even more battles to make up for it. Which becomes even more aggravating when it turns out that, despite all the grinding forced upon you, you’re probably still not strong enough to take on some of the bosses in the game. This is a game from 1994: you can save anywhere on the map, but not within a cave or dungeon or whatever, so if you spend an hour working your way through some castle that has pitfalls you can’t see or guess at the location at, forcing you to go through the same floors again and fight battles again along the way, and then you die against a boss you still weren’t ready for? Well, there are other games you could be playing instead.
Daikaijū Monogatari does have its good points. It’s a sequel to an NES Game, Kaijū Monogatari, that doesn’t require knowledge of the original to play. It focused heavily on climate disaster preceding the potential end of the world, all the way back in 1994. Its battle system is tied to its characters in an intriguing way, in that it’s sort of got a Dragon Quest III or IX thing going on, where you can swap party members in and out whenever you’d like from a central hub location in the world in order to build up the levels and skills of someone more fitting for the moment, but the difference here is that you aren’t creating randomized recruitable party members. Instead, there are 10 distinct characters with their own skills, strengths, and weaknesses, who also have their own side-missions you can choose to complete or ignore, and they’re all sitting in this tower waiting for you to call their number from the start. (That this kind of mechanic, an optional spotlighting of your party members, exists in an RPG from 1994 that seems behind the times in so many other ways is both impressive, and makes the things Daikaijū Monogatari doesn’t do well that much more annoying.) Your main character, is also very Dragon Quest in terms of balance, being pretty good at most things but excelling at no single thing, and you’re going to want to fill in the gaps based on your preferences after that.
In addition to being able to swap in and out different party members based on your needs or preferences, there are also faeries you’ll discover who will teach you specific battle skills, some of them pretty powerful and useful, and special named NPCs who you’ll interact with out in the world. While these NPCs won’t join your actual party, they do give you the okay to summon them whenever they can assist. Like the thief who knows how to put ropes in places where you can use them to climb, leading you to alternate paths or treasures in your travels, or the pig-man you rescue from certain death at the hands of one of the game’s early bosses, whose strength is… well, it’s his strength. He can unblock the paths that have giant boulders in them, which there are many of after you find someone who can clear them out. They’re situational assistants, and available in the menu: they aren’t much different than finding an item that lets you blow up a rock, or whatever, and using it when needed, but it is kind of neat to have a person there to brag about how strong or smart they are in your moment of need, instead.
It’ll take you about 20-25 hours to get through Daikaijū Monogatari, though, that’s assuming things go well for you on the navigation and not dying fronts. The problem here is that it’s hard to say you should spend 20-25 hours here, unless you’re attempting to play any RPG with a redeeming quality or two from the SNES and Super Famicom. Like with Tenshi no Uta: Shiroki Tsubasa no Inori, there’s certainly something here you could explore and come away happy about, but with so many other games in a similar vein to choose from, the question is more about “should” than “could.” This is where I’ll point out that the main antagonist’s name is “Fat Badger.” If you’re undeterred by the encounter rate or the graphics or the number of times you’ll see the word “Shelldorado” or the whole “Fat Badger” thing, the game was unofficially translated nearly a decade ago now, so have at it.
Here’s what pulled me toward Daikaijū Monogatari, besides a general desire to see the things Hudson felt compelled to put their name on. The developer, Birthday, also partnered with Hudson for the Dreamcast gem Elemental Gimmick Gear. It’s kind of a weird game in a number of ways, but weird in the right ways, and knowing that was all to Birthday’s credit had me seeking out other games of theirs. What I’ve mostly learned, though, is that Birthday was maybe better suited for action RPGs instead of turn-based ones, or that, with more experience behind them by the time of E.G.G. — yes, it’s called E.G.G. — that they were able to avoid some of the pitfalls of their past, while better marrying their ambitious ideas to their more conventional ones.
It doesn’t seem like that happened by the time of Daikaijuu Monogatari II, which apparently has much of the same complaints about it that I’ve made here about its predecessor, but hey. Maybe the more intriguing systems of that game will overpower the encounter rate, unlike here, where what works and is most interesting isn’t enough to overcome overall mediocrity. Mediocre isn’t the same thing as bad, no, but if you make the mediocrity frustrating enough it can certainly feel like there’s no difference. At least we’ve still got E.G.G. in these trying times.
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